


handshake (the devil will want you back)

by hurryup, nea_writes



Series: divine but not devout [1]
Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Backstory, Gen, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 14:55:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10879143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hurryup/pseuds/hurryup, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nea_writes/pseuds/nea_writes
Summary: The shock bled out of Kanda's eyes, turning sharply into hate. Hatred of the purest kind."I'm going to fucking kill you," he said. He spoke slowly, carefully, words flowing from him like a honey-smooth venom. "I'm going to find your soul, and when I do, I'm gonna rip it apart with my bare hands."Heaven would do well to be careful with this one,Link thought.





	handshake (the devil will want you back)

 Poland, 1924.

The town was a fog-shrouded mass, shambling out of the darkness like a gutted drunk and falling slowly into the sea. All over the town, men were struggling to keep their cigarettes lit. These cigarettes, Link realizes, were a new fashion; slim and match-lit, much quicker to light than the pipes that had been popular not even thirty years ago. 

It was a a cold winter's day, cold even by the standards of the Polish coast. Link was nearly blinded the force of the mistral, wind whipping through the air and threatening to sweep everything away with it in it's hysteric fury. 

Everywhere, all over, things were taking off. The skirts of passing ladies' overcoats were whipped beneath the force of the gale, tablecloths and napkins went fluttering from the terraces of home-style cafes, and the shuttered windows of every nearby home banged shut with a snap so sharp their hinges nearly splintered.

 An old gentleman's hat was knocked off his head, and it would have scurried away into the snow had he not been able to pin to the ground with the help of his walking stick. Link was sorely tempted to apologize to him.

The foul weather was, after all, the undeniable result of his presence.

Link trudged up to the inn, stamping the snow off his boots and off the handle of his suitcase. He didn't need to stay here— demons didn't need to sleep, after all— but he didn't much feel like waiting in the cold until nightfall.

"You look like you've come a long way from home," the innkeeper's wife said, lifting her gaze from her work to affix him with a narrow-eyed stare. Her hands slowed where they'd been wiping down the counter top. Probably wondering what it was about Link that seemed so off about him. This was a common reaction.

"Very," Link agreed severely, remembering to speak in Polish only at the very last second.

He accepted her handshake, too exhausted himself to find some pretense to refuse. Her warm, gnarled hands curled around his gloved hands, and her fate was sealed. She would be dead in less than a month due to liver failure. He hoped she'd have the sense to do some good on Earth before her eventual end. Link didn't much fancy the sea, and he was loathe to make a return trip.

"We don't get too many customers at this time of the year," she said, still wary. "Have you come to see the coast? I'm afraid you've come a little early for the fishing."

Link smiled politely.

"Here on business, I'm afraid."

"What business could you possibly have here?"

"Repossessions, mostly," Link said. "Dull work, I assure you. I'll only be here the one night. I've a train to catch in the city tomorrow."

He shrugged his coat off, and she outstretched her arm to take it from him. She waited for a beat for him to take off his gloves, too, and he pointedly ignored her. He paid her upfront for a night's stay, declined her offer of dinner.

They made small talk. She refused to comment on the regime that would surely tear her country apart. She told Link about her husband (who would be cursed so long as he lived in this house), their upcoming retirement (which she would not live to see), how their apple orchard bloomed and bloomed in the summer season (it would be another 10 years until anything grew in that town again).

Link retired to his room early. It was a cozy room, really, and he took up by the desk immediately. He spent the evening reading by candlelight and listening as the wind howled against the windowpane, hating him, fearing him, begging that he leave this place. The innkeeper's wife brought him a cup of tea and wished him goodnight sometime after 10:30, and he drank it. It was warm and sweet-tasting, but did nothing to ease the slow descent of his dread,

Two hours past midnight, he packed his bags up, descended the stairs, reclaimed his coat, and left the way he came.

It took him only five minutes to reach his destination, a walk through darkness to the outskirts of the town. The wind had not slowed at all over the course of the evening. In fact, it seemed to have picked up, whistling through the streets with a frenzy bordering on terror.

His mark, Link reasoned, was not a bad man. The enemies of Hell rarely were. Ah, but it was not the duty of Hell to reward goodness, or offer concessions of mercy for those virtuous. This man had made a bargain with a demon, and he had failed to uphold his end. A simple state of affairs. Even human lawmen understood the gravity of such breaches of contract— and that a bargain unfulfilled was deserving of punishment.

Nobody understood  _business_ quite like the devil. He'd practically invented it.

Link came to the door of his house, a classic homestead whose beams shuddered and groaned beneath the weight of the wind. Link knocked once, to be polite. There was a muffled gasp from behind the door. Link knocked again. This time, a warning. There was the sound of a gun loading. How silly. Link opened the door.

He was waiting for Link by the door, shotgun shaking in his hands. He looked as though he hadn't slept in days. The poor thing had been given a terrible fright.

" _Diabeł_ ," he said. He was shaking so violently, it was a miracle he could speak at all. " _Nie, proszę. Nie moja rodzina. Boże,_ _ proszę ... _ "

"I'm afraid God cannot hear you here," Link murmured, his tone near apologetic. He advanced quietly towards him, watching with dead eyes as his shivers escalated into fully-blown sobs. There was the crackle of gunfire, then. It took Link a few moments to realize that the Polish man had fired directly into his chest. Certainly a waste, but not a bad shot, all in all.

Link pressed forwards, yanking one glove off. The devil's brand that snared around his hand from his fingers to his wrist was exposed to the laughing light of the moon; the unmoving, all-seeing eye of the night.

He would take no pleasure in this. No pleasure, and no pride.

You couldn't blame Link for any of this, really. He was only as good or as evil as his orders, bound body and soul to Hell's binding promise.

_Blame God,_ Link thought, for forsaking me.  _Blame the silence of angels. When the devil's hand is the first to find you in your hour of need, what choice do you have but to shake it?_

"Be still, now," Link said, sotto. With his still-gloved hand, he traced the curve of his mark, withdrawing a wicked-long, black blade from the center. Eyes went wide, shotgun clattering between terrified hands. "You'll wake the children."

 

* * *

  


Link felt Kanda enter before he even saw him. Before he even heard his feet coming up the stairs.

If Kanda had been sent to save this family, he had failed. If he had been sent to collect their souls, he was right on time. 

When Kanda stepped through the door, Link's knife was carving through the last of them, sawing through flesh and bone with the passionless efficiency of a butcher, or a surgeon.

The air shivered with power. Impossible to ignore. Link paused, glancing up from his work. Kanda's wings were still spread out behind him, just a shade too big for the room they were standing in, pristine and gorgeous and bright.

Kanda's eyes. They were haunted.

The bodies. He'd seen the bodies.

Moving through the house, he must have discovered them one-by-one; a mother speared in her kitchen, children gutted in their beds, their father's corpse kneeling upright in the threshold with gored eyes staring far, far past this life.

It wouldn't be the first time this particular angel had borne witness to Link's sin. It wouldn't likely be the last, either.

Link turned his eyes away from Kanda. He braced one hand against the child's ribcage and yanked his knife free with a hideous, wet sound. The incision that drew an ugly red slash across the soft flesh of his throat prevented him from screaming, but not from moving; he bucked against Link in either pain or shock, eyes glassing over with the soft film of tears.

"He'll be yours in a minute," Link told Kanda, though he did not lift his gaze. He watched, with a look so delicate to be nearly motherlike, as the wretched little boy in his arms shuddered himself to sleep. Link had never taken the soul of a child, but he imagined they were soft to the touch; sweet and naive and full of pleasant light.

There was a beat of silence. Heavier than death. Kanda said nothing. Link looked up at him, then, feeling he could run from his judgement no longer.

Kanda was beautiful and terrifying, as any angel should be. Righteous fury personified. His eyes burned with an unquenchable flame, the white-hot spirit of vengeance. A vengeance that would allow the wicked no rest. Every beautiful sinew of his body seemed to tremble towards that purpose. There was a cool, flower-like charm to him. A loveliness. All the same, there could be no denying the strength there, too, written into the sinews of his beautiful, marble-pale body.

"I trust Alma is well?" Link asked.

He cast his knife to the nothing from where it had come, and rose back to his feet, pulling his glove back over his hand. He felt heavy was blood. It had soaked through his coat and pants, was congealing into dense knots over his hair. It looked black in the moonlight. It looked as black as Link felt.

The shock bled out of Kanda's eyes, turning sharply into hate. Hatred of the purest kind.

"I'm going to fucking kill you," he said. He spoke slowly, carefully, words flowing from him like a honey-smooth venom. "I'm going to find your soul, and when I do, I'm gonna rip it apart with my bare hands." 

_Heaven would do well to be careful with this one,_ Link thought.

"For an angel, your language truly leaves something to desire," he said instead. He was sorely tempted to reach up and wring some of the blood from his braid, though he was sure the gesture would do nothing but further enrage Kanda.

"Get out of here," Kanda growled. He surged forwards, eyes dangerous, looking as though he was physically restraining himself from outright attacking Link. "Get the hell out of here, and I swear to God, next time I see you, I'll cleanse you from this fucking Earth like the fucking  _stain_ you are."

Link smiled, walking back across the room to collect his briefcase. This was not the time to be lingering. He had a train to catch in Warsaw, a lover waiting in Berlin, and with the beast of war rearing its head over fair Germany, work to be done.

Idly, he wondered if it was even possible— if one day, Kanda could ever make good on his promise. An unlikely possibility. He'd never been so lucky in his life.

"Do take care," he said, soft and ashamed beneath the cover of darkness. "And please, be gentle when you carry these little ones back home."

_An unfortunate thing, to see the son punished for the sins of his father._

Link's smile faded.

Kanda stared back and said nothing; there was nothing left to say, not in the face of so much blood. 

Link tipped himself back, pitching back into a freefall until he met his own shadow. It was warm. Soft. It welcomed him.

He closed his eyes, slipping down into the dark.

Berlin was waiting, and wrapped in the silk sheets of a cold and loveless penthouse suite, so was Neah.

  

* * *

 

 Birmingham, 1949.

It was about eleven o'clock at night, late December, the night long and crisp look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the streets. Link was wearing a black suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks. He was dressed for a funeral, neat, clean, shaved and sober. There was no rule, really, that demanded all demons dress in black; Link simply preferred to. It created a certain sense of continuity with his identity. Plus, he wasn't one to stand out.  
  
He opened a dark umbrella and lifted it over his head just as the first spits of an eventual downpour began to soak into the stones.

He stood with his back to the front of a liquor store, waiting for the train to come by. This was a poor, ugly-looking neighborhood; one whose fortunes were unlikely to turn about now that Link had set foot over the streets. Here, shuttled up against the brick wall, were painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick businesses that had crawled there to die.

A man came up next to Link, lighting himself a cigarette with the wisp of a match. The heady scent of smoke filled the space in between them, blending peculiarly with scents of storm, of dust, of cologne, and the vague chemical reek of death. Rude, really, Link thought, for him to smoke right up in his space. Link tilted his umbrella back an inch, frowning subtly.

Then, that same rudeness began to make a great deal of sense.

"It's been a while," Link said politely. Neither of them were wearing hats, though it was typical of men. It was a style neither of them had adapted two, and Link suspected they were both quietly waiting for it to pass. "Good evening."

Kanda made an expression of fierce distaste, but he didn't say anything. He didn't bother opening up an umbrella, even as the lazy drip of rain stirred up into a jettison, a torrent. He stood in the middle of it, eyes fully of fury and pain, like a man waiting to be struck by lightning. Curiously, not a single drop seemed to reach his skin.  
He looked tired. Dead-eyed. The last few years had been unkind to Kanda. Unkind to all of them.

They stood in silence; silence of heaviest sort, wrapping about them like a gauze. Suffocating. Link did not mention the war. Neither did Kanda. They didn't have to. They had an eternity ahead of them to think about it. The atrocities of Hell. The enduring failures of Heaven.

Kanda's failures were writ all over his face, seared into the furrow of his fine brow, his haunted eyes. A thousand years of righteous vengeance, and the last fifty had broken him.

"I heard about Alma's fall," Link said, very gently. He bowed his head. "I'm sorry."

Kanda's eyes hardened into an expression of pure, unadulterated hatred. A familiar expression, one that had not changed in so many years.

"No, you're not," he hissed, vengeful, enraged, speaking as if to expose some hideous lie. "So shut your mouth."

"I'm being quite honest," Link said. He'd liked Alma, in his own way. Alma was personable where Kanda was not. He'd believed in innate goodness. He'd been sympathetic, even, towards Link. Link and his kind. "An unfortunate loss. You have my condolences."

Link wondered if it was that same sympathy for the devil that had led to Alma's tragic end in the first place. A tragic irony.

"Don't toy with me," Kanda said. "Jesus fucking Christ. Don't even fucking bother with the act. I know what you are. I've seen what you do."  
Link turned his eyes towards the street, endless rain, tar black streets, nightmare black, crow's eye black.

"Have... have you ever met Malcolm C. Leverrier?" He asked. Rain filled the gutters and splashed knee-high off the sidewalk. Big cops in slickers, shining like gun barrels, were jockeying like schoolboys to carry giggling girls across the worst of it. "The archdemon, I mean. I suppose you wouldn't have. And I suppose you wouldn't believe me if I told you that he's a good man. A genuinely good man. Stately. Respectable. Stern, even austere, but reassuring in his resolve. Ah, well. To me, at least. He's quick to reassure me, in those darkest of places, that the work we do is necessary. Just. That we perform a necessary role; the inglorious job of maintaining balance. That we're been abandoned by Heaven; that we'd never had a choice but to give into wickedness."

The streets would flood, soon; a thin film of water washed over the top of the curb, curling around Link's shoes. A laughing couple in shining dashed through the rain, holding on to one another desperately as they curled up into the shelter of a sodden awning.

"You don't actually believe any of that bullshit, do you?" Kanda said. The way he said it, it was almost like he was laughing. There was no laughter in his eyes, though. His eyes were burning.

"Sometimes," Link said. He paused, hoping Kanda would understand. _I try to believe it. I need to._

Kanda didn't move a muscle.

"Did you feel just," he said, "killing those children?"

Link closed his eyes.

I felt like I was doing my job, Kanda.

"I don't remember the faces of the children I killed that night," he said instead, measured. "Nor do I remember their names. But I remember you, and I remember what you said."  
  
_I'll cleanse you from this fucking Earth like the fucking stain you are._

He wondered if Kanda meant it. Part of him was desperate for some sign he hadn't. Another was counting on it. Depending on it.

Kanda leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Then, quite suddenly, he opened them again. He stared up at the sky, the black whorl of clouds ahead. But he still didn't say anything. His silence seemed to speak volumes, but Link wasn't quite sure what it meant; whether Kanda meant to absolve him, or condemn him, or if he really even cared at all. Beautiful, brutal, broken thing he was.

A bell tolled. There was a whoop of a cheer somewhere, far off into the night. Something shattered, Laughter erupted, choked off, fell away into night. On cue, the train rolled into the station, grinding along down the track with a hiss of hot air. Link held back a sigh. 

"Happy New Year, Kanda," he said instead, closing his umbrella. The cold rain fell into his hair and fell down onto his cheeks, like freezing tears. "The years are long, but you mustn't given in now."

_Not you._

Link pulled away, away from Kanda's light, and stepped down onto the platform. Kanda stood back, not following, saying nothing, untouched by the storm and gorgeous in angelic misery.

Kanda's eyes followed him as he boarded. Followed him through the windows, through the halls. They followed him over the countryside, over the years, between Earth and Hell.

They would not release him, Link knew, for a long, long time.

 

**Author's Note:**

> hurryupfic @ tumblr  
> fuckhowardlink @ twitter


End file.
